Alex Harris

People often ask Alex Harris what he wanted to say when he first went to Cuba in 1998. “I wanted to see what the pictures would tell me,” he counters. “The camera says more than I know.”

Harris chose three icons of the island—the American car, the beautiful woman, and the revolutionary hero—as metaphors to explore the distortions with which Cubans and Americans see one another. Harris’s car photos, for example, capture a view of Cuba through the American lens: imported U.S. cars that literally frame the way Cubans see their island.

A former student of Walker Evans, who spent several weeks in Cuba at age 29, the island was perhaps a natural destination for Harris. “One of the things that gave me the chutzpah to go to Cuba was the fact that Evans went there in 1933 knowing even less than I did,” he said.

Virginia Beahan

Virginia Beahan saw Cuba for the first time in 2001, but had been interested in the island since her visit to Miami’s Little Havana in the ‘80s. A landscape photographer, she was struck by the signs of history that dotted the terrain, and “how present the sense of history was made to everyone who came to Cuba.”

By contrast, she found history all but erased at the Bay of Pigs, site of the failed U.S.-backed counter revolution in 1961. “I have a vivid imagination, and I’d hoped to find something dramatic, like a crashed American airplane,” she admitted. Instead, there was black coral, a metal ladder—and a beautiful sunset over the sea, which she captured in a 12-minute exposure.

“The picture relies on a meeting of the viewer and the photograph,” she explained. Its meaning comes from what you “might begin to imagine about history, about storytelling, and about the specific place.”

Alexey Titarenko

Alexey Titarenko was drawn to Cuba in 2003 following years spent photographing his home town of Saint Petersburg—like Havana, a once-grand city transformed by revolution and slow decay under Communist rule.

“I was trying to find out what Cubans’ experience was,” he said, “and how the outside world could feel the same way by looking at my images.” Against a grey atmosphere with striking light, ghostly figures go about everyday tasks—gathering water at a tank, helping a neighbor repair his car, playing an impromptu game of ball.

By employing a slow shutter speed, Titarenko deliberately rendered his subjects generalized and universal. “If you’re in a place that is lost in time, showing people who wear exactly the same clothing you wear here in Los Angeles or in Europe pushes you out” of the photograph, he told us. “When there are a lot of details, we spend our attention on them, instead of on the place as a whole.”